You probably assume that you know what the word “expat” means. The writer Lucy Mushita first heard that word from European and American professionals who had come to work in her home country (Zimbabwe); they used it to describe themselves. She looked it up in a dictionary and found out that “expat” designates someone who goes to live or work in a country that is not his or her own. Later, however, she discovered that the word had a more limited scope than what its dictionary meaning suggested. “When I arrived in France and introduced myself as an expat, people looked at me with wide eyes,” she describes in her latest book Expat Blues. “They asked me if I’d fled poverty, misery or war, and I replied that I hadn’t. I was an expat. I was an expat who had followed her husband to France. But I realized that the word didn’t work for black people in the Western world.”
